This makes it somewhat ironic that, during his pontificate, Benedict XVI found himself delivering a series of tightly argued addresses, all of which emphasized the West's need to return to right reason in the fullest sense of that word.

These speeches and their implications for law and democracy are explored in a collection of essays entitled Pope Benedict XVI's Legal Thought: A Dialogue on the Foundation of Law, edited by Marta Cartabia and Andrea Simoncini.

The flight from right reason, so apparent in Western culture and Christian life since the 1960s, has long worried many Jewish and Christian scholars.

The 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, for instance, can only be fully understood against the background of efforts by some moral theologians—many of whom, such as the late Josef Fuchs SJ, were not coincidentally from the German-speaking world—to maintain the language of natural law while infusing it with consequentialist and proportionalist argumentation to legitimize positions clearly contrary to longstanding Christian teaching concerning exceptionless moral absolutes.

Perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of Pope Benedict's efforts to restore reason to its proper place in the West and religious intellectual life more generally was his willingness to go, as another pope often says, to "the peripheries" to make his case. Put another way, to the extent that what some people call "the Benedict Option" involves Christians disengaging from a thoroughly secularized public square and declining to present arguments based on public reason, the sixteenth Pope Benedict was not inclined to embrace this approach. Continue reading

Sources

• The Witherspoon Institute, from an article by Samuel Gregg, Research Director at the Acton Institute.
• Image: Ignatius Insight

In 1972, Fr Joseph Ratzinger originally wrote that marriage was indissoluble in the eyes of the Church, but if a "second marriage has proven to have taken on a moral and ethical dimension" and is "lived in the spirit of the faith", with "moral obligations" towards children and wife, then an opening of communion after a period of probation "seems to be nothing more than just and completely following the line of church tradition".

The original essay is circulating again in Church circles and when considering the recent Church Synod on the Family has been quoted regularly by Cardinal Walter Kasper.

Ratzinger has now redacted the fourth volume of his writings to exclude the controversal paragraphs.

Fr Vincent Twomey, one of Ratzinger's former doctorate students, suggested the omission was a "significant" attempt by the former pope to prevent his earlier words - written in a different context, time and role - being used against him now.

"Theologians must be free to push the boundaries, as Ratzinger was doing 42 years ago," said Fr Twomey. "His position [now] is quite different, but his statement from then is now being given added authority through his later position as pope."

In announcing his retirement due to advanced age, the former Pope said his strengths were no longer suited to the adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry and that he wished to devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer.

Sources

• Irish Times
• CathNews NZ
• Image: Catholic Herald

It is a mixed and somewhat arbitrary selection of reading that has formed my ideas about life and literature.

Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I don't mind joining half the world in nominating LOTR one of the great reads of my life and among the most influential, though I was late coming to it.

There are few things more pleasurable than a gripping story which is also very long, since we never want a really great tale to end.

Tolkien's epic "fairy story" also reawakened in me a childish delight in imaginary worlds and creatures, where, at the same time, familiar struggles and victories are played out in a way completely plausible to, and instructive for real humans.

Thanks to Tolkien's profound intelligence, love for Creation and teeming imagination, I fell in love again with creative fantasy.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Oxford Authors) Ed. Catherine Phillips, (OUP 1986).

This collection of the 19th century English poet's work includes letters and other prose pieces, but it is his highly original poetic style that opened my eyes to nature and the "dearest freshness deep down things" as a teenager at secondary school.

I struggled to understand some of the few poems we studied then until I heard them on a recording.

I am still not sure that I fully grasp the meaning of "sprung rhythm" or follow all his imagery, but I will never forget lines such as:

Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!...

Introduction to Christianity, by Joseph Ratzinger (1968). Continue reading

• Carolyn Moynihan in MercatorNet

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

In 1972, Professor Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, put forward an argument based on "oikonomia" - good spiritual housekeeping - a part of Eastern Church tradition.

He argued that Communion could be given to those in second marriages provided the first had broken down irrevocably, penance had been performed and the second union was filled with a spirit of faith.

Professor Orsy, from Georgetown University in the United States, said Ratzinger's argument provided the Church with the capacity to sense the presence of the Holy Spirit and accept an invitation to forgive.

Cardinal Ratzinger later stepped back from his proposal.

Professor Orsy explored options available to a hypothetical divorced and remarried woman during a Dublin lecture titled "Divorce, Remarriage, and the Eucharist - A Lecture exploring the limits of God's mercy".

The woman's husband from her first marriage had left her and she had children in the second marriage.

Professor Orsy, who is a noted canonist, dealt with approaches recommended by Cardinals Gerhard Muller and Walter Kasper, but found they did not ultimately help the woman.

The former involved living as brother and sister without sexual intercourse, while the second argues the law is insufficient for the totality of the pastoral situation.

But in the Ratzinger argument, the methodology moves away from deducing from laws, or from notions of "'dispensation", Professor Orsy said.

It involves a "leap" to another level, which emerges from the capacity of the Church to sense an invitation of the Spirit, grasp the invitation and act on it.

It involves a "supernatural" instinct that recognises there are human situations for which there are no human solutions.

In this case the Church has the capacity to perceive God's mercy and has the power to open the way for it.

Such an approach would bring a concrete, particular and personal solution to an otherwise insoluble problem, Professor Orsy said.

But he warned that the Church must move forward together by perceiving the Spirit, "in full communion".

"I am not talking about anybody going in any direction they want," he said.

Sources

• The Tablet
• Irish Jesuit News
• Image: Flickr

Reverend Prof Richard Burridge, Dean of King's College London, said, once denounced as blasphemous and an insult to Christians, Monty Python's Life of Brian, is in fact a "remarkable tribute to the life of Jesus".

He said those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were "embarrassingly" ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message.

Burridge was speaking as Michael Palin devoted a slot on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, which he was invited to guest edit.

Burridge is the only non Catholic to be presented with the 2013 Ratzinger Prize by Pope Francis.

Jesus's only appearance in the film is during the Sermon on the Mount. Brian is standing at the back of the multitude and cannot hear, mistaking "Blessed are the Peacemakers" for "Blessed are the Cheese-makers".

Prof Burridge said that the fact that the Pythons had set out to write a satire about Jesus but had to resort to using a fictional failed messiah was a tribute to the uniqueness of Christ which Christians had failed to capitalise on.

He said: "What is interesting about what Cleese says is that when they sat down to read the gospels they were struck by Jesus, his teaching, and realised that you couldn't actually make a joke of these things which is why the accusation from Mervyn Stockwood and Malcolm Muggeridge that they were trying to use Jesus was so patently false.

"I think it is an extraordinary tribute to the life and work and teaching of Jesus - that they couldn't actually blaspheme or make a joke out of it.

"What they did was take ordinary British people and transpose them into an historical setting and did a great satire on closed minds and people who follow blindly.

"They were satirising closed minds, they were satirising fundamentalism and persecution of others and at the same time saying the one person who rises above all this was Jesus, which I think is remarkable and I think that the church missed that at the time," said Burridge.

Source

• The Telegraph
• Image: The Lexi Cinema

Father Reese had good reason to be afraid. One of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's last acts before becoming Pope Benedict XVI was to fire Reese, who was then editor in chief of the Jesuit magazine "America," which published the Pope Francis interview last week.

Ratzinger fired Reese while Pope John Paul II was dying in 2005.

It wasn't the editorials in "America" that riled Ratzinger. "I never had an editorial about abortion, women priests or gay marriage," he says. "That would have been touching the third rail. It was mostly a dialogue."

How things have changed.

As it turns out, Reese was ahead of his time, espousing for years the views that Francis espouses. And he paid the price for it. Put another way, it is clear to Reese that Francis would not have been Benedict's choice to succeed him.

According to Reese, the Vatican had indicated its displeasure at "America" for five years before Reese was fired.

They accused him of being anti-hierarchical.

But the "high point of my career," Reese said, were two articles he published by Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican official in charge of ecumenics.

Kasper challenged Ratzinger on church theology. Reese submitted the galleys to Ratzinger, who wrote a response. "That was the kind of communication I wanted to have in the magazine," he says.

Big mistake, it turns out. Ratzinger was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the watchdog of the Vatican.

Word came from Rome: "Reese has got to go," he says.

"I was running a journal of opinion and they only wanted one opinion. They wanted an echo chamber of what was coming out of the Vatican."

Once fired, Reese went to the Woodstock Theological Center, which closed in June. He is now on sabbatical before returning in January to a job with the National Catholic Reporter. The church won't be able to fire him this time. It's an independent publication, unlike "America."

"Francis is saying, 'Get out in the streets and do something. You'll make mistakes. That's fine,' " says Reese. "Staying in the sacristy is killing the church...." Continue reading

From what comes across my desk in theological literature there is still a lot of life in the Virtual Council, though it is true that it holds no enchantment for young seminarians or members of new ecclesial movements. Thus, the Church of the future, as a matter of demography, will be more closely oriented to the documents of the Real Council.

The end of the "Virtual Council"

When Blessed John Paul II lay dying he said to the youth who had travelled to Rome to offer their prayerful support: "I have searched for you, and now you have come to me, and I thank you." Less irenically he might have said, "I have tried to get through to you, notwithstanding layers and layers of deaf and dumb bureaucrats, and now that I am dying, the fact that you are here means that at least some of you understood, and this is my consolation." Similarly, Benedict seemed to be saying to the clergy of Rome, notwithstanding all the banality, all the pathetic liturgies, all the congregationalist ecclesiology, the Virtual Council of the Media has lost its dynamism. It is no longer potent. It no longer sets the course of human lives; it no longer inspires rebellion. It too has become boring and sterile. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report
• Image: Catholic in Brooklyn

During most of the past seven years, however, that anticipated upheaval has seemed a lot like the dog that didn't bark. Back in February 2006, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus famously voiced "palpable unease" among those most elated by Ratzinger's election, and that disappointment endured in a swath of Catholic opinion which had begun to despair that the pope would ever impose order.

Of late, however, many observers believe the "real Ratzinger" has finally come out to play. Consider the tumult of the past month:

• On April 18, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decreed a sweeping overhaul of the Leadership Conference for Women Religious, the main American umbrella group for the superiors of women's orders, to correct what the congregation described as LCWR's "corporate dissent" on issues such as women's ordination and homosexuality, and its contamination by "radical feminism."
• At least five Irish priests have faced Vatican-inspired discipline, with implementation left to their religious orders. Two Redemptorists have seen their writings for a church magazine either withdrawn or limited (one was also dispatched to a monastery for a six-week "reflection"), a Passionist prominent in the English media is now subject to prior censorship, and both a Marist and a Capuchin have been told to stop writing and speaking on certain hot-button topics.
• On April 5, Benedict XVI included some blistering language in his Holy Thursday homily about a "call to disobedience" issued by more than 300 priests and deacons in Austria who oppose celibacy and support women's ordination. The pope called the effort "a desperate push to do something to change the church in accordance with (their) own preferences and ideas." Continue reading

Sources

• John L Allen Jr in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: NY Daily News

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano published photos of the two sitting side-by-side in prayer after Mass on Saturday in the Pope's private chapel.

It said Benedict on Friday night cut short an Easter week vacation at the papal holiday retreat in the hills outside Rome to welcome Georg Ratzinger, an 88-year-old priest and former choirmaster who is nearly blind.

The elder Ratzinger arrived from their native Germany for several key dates the two will celebrate together. Benedict on Thursday marks the seventh anniversary of his election as pontiff.

Georg Ratzinger has said that the two brothers have always been close. Continue reading

The count, along with a few details of the brief conclave leading to the election of Pope Benedict XVI, was published Sept. 23 in Limes, a respected Italian journal usually focused on geopolitics.

On each of the four ballots, the magazine said, the prelate receiving the second-highest number of votes was Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

Limes said its information came from the diary of an anonymous cardinal who, while acknowledging he was violating his oath of secrecy, felt the results of the conclave votes should be part of the historic record.

The journal said it confirmed the diary's count with other cardinals.

The Vatican's US attorney, Jeffrey S. Lena, welcomed the decision saying the case was "held together by no more than a mendacious web of allegations of internal conspiracy."

The case was filed at the height of the sexual abuse controversy in 2010. Anderson alleged the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and his deputies knew about allegations of sexual abuse involving the late Fr Lawrence Murphy at St John's School for the deaf and failed to defrock him, despite numerous requests from US bishops.

Anderson argued that despite Murphy's age and ill health, the Vatican was directly involved in protecting abusive priests.

Lena labelled the suit as a 'meritless publicity stunt'.

Anderson however claimed that the goal was now accomplished in a secondary way, after a favorable ruling this past week from a federal court in which the Archdiocese of Milwaukee had filed bankruptcy. He said he was given 30,000 pages of new documents that show how Vatican officials were indifferent to reports of clergy sex abuse.

"There really is no compelling reason to move forward with this battle on two fronts when we're making ground on one," he said Saturday.

While his initial goal was to depose Ratzinger and other top officials, Anderson acknowledged that the legal impediments were proving to be enormous. He said at the least the new documents represent a "consolation prize — it's not a victory but it's still a real prize."

Lena labelled Anderson's settlement as "settling on a convenient excuse for dismissing the lawsuit."

"The real reason is, he was required to file a response to our motion to dismiss, and he knew he was going to lose the suit," Lena said.

Sources

• Associated Press
• Washington Post
• Image

The statement was made in an unclassified diplomatic cable, and is one of many documents made public in the latest release of Wikileaks documents.

"Despite a week of media speculation suggesting that German Cardinal and close John Paul II collaborator Joseph Ratzinger was moving close to a majority of votes, it appears that he lacks enough support to achieve the required two-thirds, given strong opposition from factions that see Ratzinger as too rigid and jealous of Rome's prerogatives," the cable stated.

"Some of these forces appear to be uniting around retired Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, as a standard-bearer for the initial votes that will test the strength of the differing groups, though he is not expected to be a viable candidate."

"Based on these initial showings, the cardinals in subsequent votes are expected to shift to other candidates who reflect the Ratzinger or Martini views, but who offer better hope of garnering support from other groups. Italian Cardinals Ruini or Scola, and Argentinian Cardinal Bergolio would be suitable to the Ratzinger camp, while Milan's Archbishop Cardinal Tettamanzi or Brazilian Cardinal Hummes could pull the support of the anti-Ratzinger groups," the cable stated.

Warning that the race to the papacy was very difficult to pick, the US embassy cable seemed to favour the prefect for the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos.

Wikileaks has also been criticised by a retired Filipino bishop.

A retired prelate yesterday warned the public not to take information from Wikileaks, a website that publishes classified data, as absolute truth.

Wikileaks earlier revealed that the Holy See pressured the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines to remain neutral in the controversy surrounding alleged fraud during the 2005 national elections.

"I can say for certainty because I was there all along. The Vatican was not even mentioned. This is the first time I heard about it," Archbishop Oscar Cruz, former head of the bishops' conference.

"One should also be perceptive [when] reading it," he said.

Cruz said "WikiLeaks has a lot of wonderful things but you don't take it hook, line and sinker."

Sources

• Catholic Culture
• ucanews.com
• Wikileaks Cable Release

Gathered for their annual seminar with the pontiff at Castel Gandolfo, Benedict said. "We, who have been able to know [Christ] since our youth, may we ask forgiveness because we bring so little of the light of his face to people; so little certainty comes from us that he exists, he's present and he is the greatness that everyone is waiting for," the Pope said.

Each year the meeting centres its focus on a topic of current interest, and this year Benedict chose to focus discussion on the possible contribution of theology to the "new evangelisation," the topic at the centre of the next Synod of Bishops.

The meeting was addressed by two speakers,

• Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, a lecturer in the philosophy of religion at Dresden University, who examined the topic:"Speaking to Athens of Jerusalem. Words of God in a world that resists," and
• Otto Neubauer, Director of the Academy for Evangelization of the Emmanuel Community in Vienna, who spoke on "An ever new evangelisation - where poverty becomes a bridge to men and women."

Summarising the discussions for L'Osservatore Romano, Cardinal Schoenborn, one of Ratzinger's former students, said participants felt that World Youth Day events in Madrid represented a fresh "boost of renewed hope" for the Church.

He said older generations had suffered by first living their faith at a time when Church life was thriving, and now watching parishes lose parishioners.

But today's young Catholics seem to realise they are a minority in a secular, relativistic world and have shown their "undaunted willingness to give witness to their peers in such an environment," he said.

Inaugurated in 1977 after Professor Ratzinger was named Archbishop of Munich, the Ratzinger Schulerkreis, has continued each year meeting annually with his alumni, those who defended their theses with him.

This year participants were joined by members of the "new" Schuelerkreis, the sodality founded four years ago that is made up of students who have written their theses on texts by Joseph Ratzinger.

About 40 people from various countries took part in the meeting.

Sources

• Vatican Insider
• L'Osservatore Romano
• Vatican Radio
• Catholic Herald
• Image: Blog of the friends of Pope Ratzinger